Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is the Aboard podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Rich, I just got back from Phoenix, Arizona!

Rich: That’s cool.

Paul: Yeah. Let’s talk about it.

Rich: All right.

[intro music]

Rich: So: Just got back from Phoenix.

Paul: It was a whirlwind tour.

Rich: Sounds like it.

Paul: It sounds like—it’s a big city.

Rich: What were you doing in Phoenix?

Paul: I was presenting on vibe coding with a couple other people at the Inc. 5000 Conference.

Rich: Inc. 5000 companies?

Paul: Yes. Business—lot of businesses.

Rich: That’s a long list.

Paul: It is a long list. It was a good trip. It was nice to be invited.

Rich: All right.

Paul: And I had a kind of wild experience, because this—you know, usually I go to technology conferences.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And this was just business.

Rich: Okay, so just to clarify, it’s not an AI conference.

Paul: No, no, no.

Rich: It’s not a vibe-coding conference.

Paul: We were a breakout session for business people who are curious about AI.

Rich: Ah.

Paul: And it’s 5,000, so you’re kind of in the longer part of the tail. Not all the way down to small business.

Rich: It’s not Fortune 500.

Paul: No, no. I mean, a lot of these people are from companies that are worth billions, but it is, like, these are on the smaller side compared to, like, Google, right?

Rich: Sure.

Paul: You know, and that’s where, when people think “business in America,” they actually don’t think about these businesses that much.

Rich: Got it.

Paul: This is people who go to the office and sell carpeting and flooring and stuff like that, but at a certain scale.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they all have technology needs. And so just to kind of cut to the chase, we’re talking in this room, it’s me and a couple other people, and I sort of was like, “Hey, this is where I think software used to be, and this is where it’s going to be next year.” And so where it used to be was a process where, you know, you’d kind of need something, it would take a year or two, you’d need to get a consultant, you’d need to get a CTO, if you didn’t have one.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Chief Technology Officer. And it’s kind of like, spend, spend, spend, and then maybe a year later you get something. Even if you use Salesforce.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: You know, even if you use something kind of off-the-shelf or very customizable.

Rich: So you’re highlighting there is a certain size of business—which is sizable. We’re not talking about storefronts, by the way.

Paul: No, no. It’s, like, 50% of the economy. We just don’t talk about it because it’s so boring.

Rich: [laughing] Right.

Paul: People care about, like, Mark Zuckerberg doing weird stuff. That’s, like, good news.

Rich: Ray-Ban AI glasses.

Paul: If you go to the cover of the—if you’re on a homepage of the Times right now, it’s just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Okay? For obvious reasons. But is there anything else going on in America right now?

Rich: AI, I guess?

Paul: No! There’s a million things. There’s a million things that are kind of on the horizon.

Rich: I mean, bless their hearts, there’s a lot of people who don’t get caught in that news cycle and are actually just running their distribution business or whatever.

Paul: That’s right. So it’s sort of, like, we only can focus on, like, three or four stories right now in our addle-headed state.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s, this is everybody else. Not just everybody—like, this is everybody else. And so I’m pitching to them, and they’re just, they’re nodding and their eyes are lighting up. And it’s nice. It’s nice to be in a room where, like, I don’t know, I kind of care about this cohort because the middle of the market is very forgotten, right?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Small businesses, we love. We love mom and pops. They use QuickBooks. They run the laundromat.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: You know, we make movies about them. And then the big businesses we hate and love.

Rich: We read news about them.

Paul: They run the market, we give them acronyms. We’re like, “Oh my God, here we go.”

Rich: FAANG.

Paul: “What are they doing now, because that’s gonna change my 401 (k).”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then you have this big blobby middle that’s kind of like—and when we talk about them, we do things like make TV shows like The Office.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, it’s just kind of like, “Ehhhh, they kind of suck.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “They do boring stuff and they’re all sales and they have, like, conventions at the Javits and they install windows and they need raw materials and blehhh.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not as cool as, like, a venture capital guy just makes you—

Rich: But it’s trillions, it’s trillions of dollars. It’s a massive part of the, let’s talk about the American economy. It’s a massive part of many economies. In finance parlance, it is the SMB, the small-to-medium-sized businesses. And when we say small, we don’t mean a laundromat. We mean millions to tens of millions into the hundreds of—a medium-sized business is considered hundreds of millions in revenue. It’s just worth saying.

Paul: I mean, that’s just the American economy doing what it does.

Rich: It’s doing what it does.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? And there’s thousands of them. Many thousands of them.

Paul: Yeah. And they’re filled with normal human beings who are trying to do a good job.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’re in the business because it’s worked.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They didn’t get there by chance. Talk a little bit about the sort of software no-man’s land they’ve always found themselves and they got—they run their businesses with computers. Let’s say that out loud. Like, it’s not 100 years ago. You only have to go back 30 years, and just the Microsoft Office Suite changed how small-to-medium-sized businesses work, obviously, but they also use them to run their businesses. So why have they been left out of the party?

Paul: So their eyes lit up as I started to talk to them, because here’s how the world works. If you read about technology, you see giant platforms like Salesforce on one side.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Or SAP—things that nobody knows what they really do, because they do so many things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you hire, like, Accenture to build out your SAP install for your giant manufacturing conglomerate.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you go buy three companies and then you get them all into the same SAP system.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: On the other side you have things like, “I run my business on Notion. I get out $50 a month. I use QuickBooks and I use Excel and I use these tools that everybody can just grab,” and they have tutorials and they have training and sometimes, you know, your accountant might take the output and put it into their system and so on. So that is the—

Rich: Sort of cobbled together.

Paul: Pure software as a service, like, really, really kind of generic tooling. And then you have this really ugly spot in the middle where you need things. You need custom accounting. You went public early and now you have to do the accounting. Even though you’re a smaller company, smaller companies still go public. When people talk about building a business, there’s a threshold, let’s say after, like, 30 people, where tax strategy becomes one of the most important parts of your job.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: HR and benefits and tax strategy. If you love business and you love entrepreneurship and you like to hustle.

Rich: That’s coming for you.

Paul: [laughing] You better get used to those two subjects.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That was, to me, the biggest shock of being an entrepreneur is like, “Oh my God, we’re talking about taxes again?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So here you are, you’re growing, and actually you can save, like, 15% of the money that comes in if you have a good tax strategy.

Rich: Tax strategy is meaningful, but frankly also not getting in trouble is meaningful.

Paul: Compliance.

Rich: You have to file your taxes. Like, if you think you can just throw the numbers into Notion and then at the end of the year just sort of fold them into some tax return, like, tax filing? It doesn’t work that way. As you reach a certain size, the processes overwhelm you and you could cobble, you could do, do HR with spreadsheets.

Paul: Every now and then you meet a process-oriented CEO who just is, like, “Thank God we’re at this point.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, they like it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But if they’re seeing growth, here’s the thing about software and business. If there’s growth ahead, you get real frustrated real fast with your existing processes. So you’re in this weird place where you’re not investing in software because you think it’s cool. You’re investing in it because you can’t seem to scale if you don’t have better ways of working. And that’s a weird place to be.

Paul: Also, all the SaaS tools will tell you, “We can get you there.”

Rich: Always. Always.

Paul: And the big enterprise tools are like, “Oh, you want to play, you know, you want to be a big kid?”

Rich: It’s a no-man’s land.

Paul: “Get your checkbook out.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so you’re kind of screwed either way. And then what they do, I’ll give you, I’ll just, I’ll set up a case. Like, let’s say I manufacture—my sneaker manufacturing is going really good.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’m now getting, like, $30 million a year in revenue.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And I gotta hire a CTO.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? Because I got so many orders coming in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And suppliers and so on. And my tech is all over the place, too many spreadsheets.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: How much does the CEO cost?

Rich: You know, for a lot of executives, for a lot of entrepreneurs, they don’t know the difference between a CTO and the guy who fixes your WiFi.

Paul: But let’s say I’m smart. Somebody—I’ve been listening to this podcast.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: I’m going to go get a real CTO who’s going to help me solve my problem. What do you need?

Rich: You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for that recruit, for that role.

Paul: What’s the first thing they ask for when they get the job?

Rich: Budget.

Paul: How much.

Rich: How much budget they have.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. And they’re going to need a couple million.

Rich: Yeah. Always.

Paul: Let’s say your margins, you were doing good. You were making $15 million this year on your 1$00 million.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Like, a fifth of that just went to—

Rich: It’s unfathomable.

Paul: Okay. So that was your Ski-Doo.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That was your bonus pool.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, just goodbye.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So that you can give the money to a bunch of other people so they can install software that looks not that different from the software—

Rich: Frankly, take control away from you, in a lot of ways.

Paul: So SMBs are kind of, like, caught.

Rich: Many don’t bother.

Paul: Most don’t, right?

Rich: Most don’t bother.

Paul: So they cobble it together and they hire—

Rich: They have more staff.

Paul: They hire that guy, and then that guy brings in somebody from India, and they kind of, like—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’re always looking for downward pricing. You know, like, “Where can I save here?”

Rich: They don’t care about it. They don’t see it as differentiating. You know what they see as differentiating? How shiny their silk carpets look.

Paul: It’s also like, very, very few people in this industry, because this industry takes growth for granted?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Can actually advocate for growth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? So the CTO comes in. It’s not like somebody—rarely, unless you’re really spending money and pretty serious, it’s not somebody who will be like, “I know how to get you there, and we’re going to find you 20%.”

Rich: No.

Paul: No. It’s somebody who’s like, “This is a mess. Somebody get me—I’ll clean up your mess. Give me $500,000.”

Rich: “I’ll clean up your mess.” Or I may say, “Invest a lot this year and over the next five, you’ll save money.” It’s like that. It’s not, it’s not pretty.

Paul: So I’m talking to this room, and they’re nodding. Right? Because I’m sharing this, because that’s the room I’m in, and they’re like, “Yeah.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly. All right. Now AI makes its way into the picture.

Paul: Well, this is what’s tricky. We have a strong opinion here, but vibe coding just looks like the answer to all of your problems.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: If you’re this person, right?

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Because over here, I’m going to not be able to buy a summer house, and my bonus pool will be really small.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Over here, I have to keep using Notion or spreadsheets or this crappy tool from 25 years ago that everybody hates.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And in the middle, I just tell a robot and run away, and I don’t, it’s all wonderful.

Rich: And we’ve talked a lot about vibe coding on this podcast.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, the truth is, you’ve got, in my view, two cohorts that use it. The engineer who’s curious and knows how to, like, sort of surgically remove the bits that make sense and put them into the code base. And the non-engineer who’s been given this promise, which is, “I just need to manage my fleet better.”

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Right? And they type it in and the, you know, the robot never says no. And there’s, there’s curiosity and enthusiasm and excitement, I have to assume—you were in the room.

Paul: I have never pitched a warmer room.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Just the warmest room ever. And I thought about it for a long time after.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because I’m used to New York. I’m used to just hostile, like, just angry people who are pissed. They have to—

Rich: Well, that must have felt good.

Paul: It did. People came up, they wanted to talk, they wanted to, you know.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: A lot of LinkedIn exchanges happening.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: I’m going to have some calls, all really good. So that’s good for our business. But I think what really struck me was how this giant part of the world can just kind of sit there in the middle. It’s not attractive to most venture funding, it’s not attractive to big businesses, it’s not interesting to the media. But it’s 50% of the frickin’ economy.

Rich: Yeah. And let’s talk about why it’s not attractive. It’s not because they don’t like them, or they hate them.

Paul: No, no, we like their products.

Rich: Well, no, no. For many, many years. Why is this a neglected class of customer?

Paul: Right. Because, I mean, everybody needs to get their muffler repaired. Right? So like…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Why are we ignoring these people?

Rich: Because in the past—and to this day, we’re not there yet—it’s financially unattractive, in many ways untenable, to build custom software for a small business efficiently enough and cheaply enough that it’s a for, it’s valuable, it’s good value to them and it’s good value to the vendor, to the software provider.

Paul: The economics of creating custom software just don’t line up with the economics of a medium-sized business.

Rich: They don’t line up. It’s the same—yeah.

Paul: Like, small business, you can scale out on the credit card.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And they get no custom service.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Big business, it’s all hand-holding by giant consulting firms, and you get these enormous licenses.

Rich: They have the budgets to do it. The value returned, because they’re at such a scale, it’s not hard to map out. Like, I’m going to, “It’s going to cost you $5 million bucks, but I’m going to save you $30.

Paul: Right.

Rich: “If I can eliminate this one step for you.”

Paul: Right? And you have 50,000 employees.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They will all do a 2% better job.

Rich: The case for budget is much easier to put together. The SMBs A) don’t care much. Like, here’s the thing that we want to say to the small business owners of the world. We don’t mind you not caring about software.

Paul: Boy, they don’t.

Rich: Why would you? Why would you? You care about your suppliers giving you the right threads so you can make the right curtains or whatever it is and getting it to you cheaper. You don’t care about software, and that’s okay. You don’t have to care about software. The challenge that’s been, to date, is that the time and energy it takes to service those people, to give them a solution that makes sense only for them? Is too high. And so we just didn’t bother. And we’re as guilty as anyone else, by the way. We turned away many small businesses at our agency in the past.

Paul: We had to because the economics didn’t line up.

Rich: It didn’t line up, right? And so that’s okay. And now there’s this promise—and there’s a lot of promises right now in the world. There’s a lot of promises around how tech is going to make it easier and simpler and more…cheaper, frankly. So that maybe we only have to have two conversations, because it’s so much easier to ship software. And the truth is we’re not there yet. It is an aspirational thing. But I think there is a massive opportunity, if these tools are used the right way.

Paul: You know what it is though?

Rich: Vibe coding doesn’t do it. It’s just not going to do it.

Paul: No. You know what I think we’re unlocking that’s going to be very interesting. This is—look, we’re marketing our product here, but this is actually relevant because this is a decision—

Rich: Our product is awesome.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We don’t have to apologize.

Paul: No, no, no.

Rich: Check it out at aboard.com. Let’s get that out of the way.

Paul: I’m not apologizing. I’m just sort of, like, our understanding, we’re making decisions about the product.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Based on kind of real-world economics.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Here’s the one decision that seems to really get people to lean in: No upfront costs.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: And that, it turns out—

Rich: Which is scary to us, too, by the way.

Paul: No, but it turns out—

Rich: It doesn’t always make sense. We’ve landed some clients that had upfront because the ask was so big, but… Yes.

Paul: But the reason that is so attractive is every time they’ve gone to do anything custom, they’ve been absolutely sticker shocked. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just to kind of get some pixels on the screen.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that is what it costs. Like, humans have to be involved. You got to make some decisions.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: The cost of just slopping pixels on the screen so you can have an argument about what you really want?

Rich: It’s gone down.

Paul: It’s gone down almost to zero.

Rich: It’s very cheap. And it’s not just to have an argument. They’re also a starting point.

Paul: The cost of actually shipping software is going down, but nowhere near as much. You got to actually, to get the thing you need, is still time and money.

Rich: It is. It’s less time and less money.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It is less time and less money. And the truth is, you have economies out there, you have cultures out there, that are used to billing big, and they—it’ll take them years to come to terms with the fact that their time is not as valuable because the tools are so powerful. Paul: It’s very hurtful.

Rich: It’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell people that. I don’t know what law—I don’t know what law firms are doing. They send you invoices based on hours.

Paul: I had a very nice guy who has an outsourced development firm come up to me after, and he’s like, “I gotta say, I just wonder if this is the death of my business.”

Rich: It is, but you can live again in other ways.

Paul: I was like, “Look, play with our tool, play with other tools, and go take it to your, take it to your clients.”

Rich: Yeah. If you’re asking yourself that question, you should start to look around and what you’re gonna be next week and next year.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? Like, it’s not a bad thing. The tools are powerful. They’re not shutting you out. They’re practically free. So go play. All right, so it sounds like it was a smash. Did you get a standing ovation at the end?

Paul: No, no. It was a panel. Wasn’t that. Well, but I definitely got more connection than I thought.

Rich: Roses tossed on the stage?

Paul: No, none of that. It was a, you know, it was a breakout session. Then I went in the room, and Damon Dash was talking about mushrooms and using AI to do medications.

Rich: Mushrooms, like, to get high? Or mushrooms to eat—

Paul: No, it was like—

Rich: Like, with pasta.

Paul: I still am not quite sure what happened. I had to go to the airport. [laughter] But the… So, no, it’s not, this wasn’t really about, necessarily about us.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It was just this moment where I realized this deeply underserved space is about to get the software they need. And I just don’t think that is interesting to most of the rest of the world. And I really think it should be.

Rich: It should be. Well, first off, it doesn’t have to be because you’re feeling altruistic. There’s massive amounts of money to be made if you play it right into that space.

Paul: That’s what I’m saying.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I would love to see the New York Times cover the 50% of the world economy that is sort of, like, emergent here.

Rich: Yeah, New York Times is busy.

Paul: They really, they have a lot going on.

Rich: [laughing] There’s a lot going on.

Paul: There’s a lot going on.

Rich: I’d love for us to really get to be known in that space. I think we’ll be welcomed into it. Because I think no one’s ever invited them to the party.

Paul: I mean, we literally built a space in New York City to invite them to the party.

Rich: Yes. They happen to be in Omaha, but that’s okay. Come to New York.

Paul: They love to come and look out the window, man.

Rich: They love to come and look out the window.

Paul: And we can teach m them about AI. Like, that is the structure of the company. So anyway, I guess what I would say is it was, like, a good validation. We have a lot of work to do. Everybody has a lot of work to do.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And boy, do people—the thing is, like, vibe coding is not delivering just yet. But boy, do people want it to. And they want it to for this reason: Not because they want to magically fire all the engineers and have this, like, yeah, super system that they can just whisper to.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s because they just want their thing.

Rich: I want to make a closing point here.

Paul: Go for it.

Rich: Wrapped up in sort of the AI promise is, you can call it agents, you can call it automation, you can call it agentic, which is infuriating that that word materialized. Is it a real word?

Paul: No.

Rich: What is that shit?

Paul: Just gotta make your peace with all this, man. We don’t have control.

Rich: Anyway. I don’t know why, like, AI showed up, and then agents showed up, like, a week later. And I don’t know if—I think most people don’t know the difference.

Paul: No. Because this is all stuff we’ve been talking about for 45 years.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they just, you know, people just grab whatever concepts sort of feel the most usable.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. I think it’s the lack of empathy that comes out of, like, the big tech companies that are driving the AI boom and the Valley. And like, this is the most, this is the lamest podcast that Silicon Valley could ever come across, what we’re talking about. They do not care one bit.

Paul: No.

Rich: Unless you’re gonna get a credit card out—if you look me in the eyes, I don’t want to do business with you. You have to get a credit card out, and then you can run your shitty little carpet business. They want nothing to do with it.

Paul: I think what would be exciting to them is, okay, consumer, credit card, but we can offer customization at scale so it feels like a human.

Rich: They don’t believe you, what you just said. For now. Like, right now.

Paul: Fair enough.

Rich: No one buys that. And this is the point I’m trying to make, which is you can’t automate away the—let’s even say it took two weeks instead of two months to figure out how someone works. Right? You can’t automate that away. The thing about agents, when you unleash them into an org, they don’t pause and say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about your business, and let’s talk about how we can improve some processes here.” Nobody’s doing that. Right? Instead, what it’ll do is it’ll actually reinforce and further entrench how they work today. Like, they don’t know. And they also don’t know how to leverage it. So it’s—

Paul: You know what? We should rename agents. You know what would be a better name?

Rich: Hmm?

Paul: Locusts.

Rich: Ooh. It’s a little aggressive.

Paul: Yeah. But, I mean, you’re releasing the swarm.

Rich: Is that a biblical thing?

Paul: Yeah. And then they eat all the crops.

Rich: Is that what locusts do?

Paul: Yeah. It’s not great.

Rich: Sounds like it’s not great.

Paul: All right, so maybe not a plague.

Rich: No, it is a—agents, in the most classically defined sort of silk suit sort of way?

Paul: Uh huh?

Rich: Are sort of leeches that hang on to the real transactions.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: [laughing] That’s what agents are, right? And the truth is—

Paul: Take this. Close this out. But this is actually a subtle point. Help people understand what you’re saying.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So a transaction could be anything, but in this case—

Rich: Well, I mean, what I’m getting at is these are companies that have—you pointed it out as, like, they never had access to great technology solutions.

Paul: Well, because those come with humans.

Rich: Always come with humans. There is a massive distinction between software and the solution context of software. Massive distinction. Software is brittle, stubborn, and you kind of have to work with it and read the manual.

Paul: Photoshop.

Rich: Photoshop. I was—I bought those thick, remember, there was a day when you go to the bookstore and there’s these thick books about everything.

Paul: [old man voice] Boy, do I! Go ahead.

Rich: Yeah. Solutions? The context of solutions is that you’re actually, it’s almost, it’s another word for negotiation. You’re understanding how a business works. It’s like, “Why do you do that?” They’re like, “Well, let me tell you.” And they get excited when they explain why that step is necessary. And then you have to somehow codify it into tools.

And the truth is, agents are purely, they just want to skim off the top. They don’t care about how you work. They just want to take a cut. And the truth is, yeah, they may make your steps more efficient and more rapid or more reliable, but they’re not trying to make anything better. And the truth is, again, the small business owner, they want this promise to be real.

Paul: Sure. So let me break it down just a little bit. So a consultant comes in, solutions provider.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they turn your process into a system. That’s their job. So now everybody can use the same system to enact the process, and the company behaves better and makes money more predictably.

Rich: And then you can build tools that enhance that system, that change in how you work. Right?

Paul: An agent comes in, and it’s just, like, free jazz about what the process is. But it makes something that looks very processy and—

Rich: It doesn’t even, it’s, like, we’re overthinking it, and that’s my fault. Just to, let me apologize.

Paul: Good. Take responsibility.

Rich: All agents are are automation that’s sort of unprompted—

Paul: They’re shell scripts on top of the LLM.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, they’re automation. Sometimes they can look sophisticated. They can do multiple steps of automation. But, like, I’m a mess, and you’re going to drop automation in. It’s like, how about we have a conversation? Because I can’t take spreadsheets anymore. Like, no one wants to have that conversation. Instead, it’s like automation. It’s like, okay, that is enhancing in some context and in the right places. But that’s not gonna really be the solution. That’s just not it. And look, the good news here is people are like, what happened to jobs? We’ve talked about jobs and AI. And that’s, it’s like you have to talk to someone maybe about how they work, and then you can use these tools. These are tools.

Paul: Can’t have that 50% of the economy without actually having conversation.

Rich: No. You don’t have to talk as much. We don’t have to spend months taking notes, because the tools are amazing. They’re amazing tools. But you do need to talk.

Paul: All right, well, there we go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I mean, God knows we talk.

Rich: By the way, we have no issue with actual agents. Sports agents, Hollywood agents.

Paul: Literary agents.

Rich: Literary—I don’t know what that is. Literary agents. They’re all great people. Let’s end it with that.

Paul: They’re the best. All right, Richard.

Rich: Have a lovely week, Paul, congrats on your very successful talk.

Paul: Oh, what a journey. I took a Waymo to the airport. It was an hour.

Rich: Speaking of agents.

Paul: Driven by a robot. It was magical. [laughter] All right, hello@aboard.com, if you need us, check us out. Try aboard. Go to Aboard and type in your prompt and give it a little more detail and solve your SMB-type problem. And if you need a little help, a little further advice, you can reach right out. We’ll help you.

Rich: That’s the talking part. Reach out.

Paul: We like talking.

Rich: Have a lovely week.

Paul: Byeeee.

[outro music]